About Me

I am a master planner and a self-professed book dragon. As the Launch and Operations Specialist at Author Accelerator, I work to help authors achieve their dream of completing a book. In my spare time, I read and review books.

The Best Way to Read ePubs Quickly & Easily

I bought my first eReader, a first generation Nook Color, back in December of 2010. The first three books I bought electronically…Outlander, The Book Thief and 11/22/63. I bought a Nook, because at the time it was the only eReader compatible with my library’s electronic borrowing system.

I will confess that I borrowed few books electronically and that I have few actual Nook books. The prices were high compared to Amazon and I didn’t read as much back then as I do now. Once I discovered I could buy Amazon books and convert them to ePub things started getting out of hand and my electronic collection grew.

Last year, after saving some dough, thanks to the #ShelfLove Challenge, I purchased an iPad mini. Now I am able to read ePub, PDFs and Mobi files on a single device albet with 2 or 3 different apps. The worst thing, I found, was that no matter what app I used, I couldn’t figure out how to get my notes and highlighted quotes out or synced back to the Cloud. And, y’all know how I love my quotes.

After some searching and digging online, I found a great app that I fell in love with. It’s an app called Gerty. Now Gerty only offers support for ePubs, but since most of my books were converted already, it was a transition that wasn’t difficult. I didn’t need to change how I handle getting ARCs or new Amazon books which made adoption of the app easy.

So why do I love Gerty?

All my eBooks are managed using Calibre and I have my Calibre library saved to Dropbox (affiliate link). As long as I have an internet connection, I can get to my books via Gerty.

You don’t have to stay connected to keep reading. Just download your book, turn off your connection (longer battery life means you can read longer) and just connect back to the Net when you are ready. Gerty syncs the file back to Dropbox.

As I read books on Gerty, the data syncs back to the files on Dropbox so I always have a back up of the latest file.

Gerty keeps track of reading statistics and at the end of the book, it will record how many hours you spent reading that book.

There’s a journal feature that allows you to take pictures, keep notes and quotes, track the words you looked up and their meanings. You can tag (including Geotags) most of these items to to locate them at a future date. AND (this is my favorite feature), you can create an ePub when you are done reading and export that for future reference.

I’m hoping use Calibre to create a compilation of my favorite quotes at some point. Just need to read more eBooks first.

You don’t have “turn” pages. The scrolling is top to bottom.

There are 10 different fonts to choose from if you aren’t a fan of the default font.

You can adjust the space the text takes on your screen both horizontally AND vertically.

There are 6 different background colors to choose from.

It shows you the percent complete within the book overall and within the chapter. Ooooo!

You can send tweets directly from the app. I’ve tweeted quotes and messages to the author of the book I’m reading. (You can also share to Facebook and Flickr.)

There is an auto scroll feature so you don’t have to scroll as you read. You can even set the speed. (I can’t use this feature. It gives me motion sickness.)

You can justify the text as well as decide whether to employ hyphenation.

What I Wish Gerty Did Better

I wish that Gerty integrated with GoodReads like the Kindle app does and I wish it could read PDFs.

Is it worth the money?

You can use Gerty for free, but all the features won’t be available until you pay for the app. For me, the $3.99 I spent on the app was well worth it. I can read my eBooks, sync them to Dropbox, delete them from my iPad and still have all my notes and quotes. I’ve found my dream reading app. Now to compile all my favorite quotes…

4 responses to “The Best Way to Read ePubs Quickly & Easily”

Gerty sounds way cool, Terri! I like all the features it offers and I’m happy you’ve found the perfect reading app. I giggled over the timer…yeah, I so wouldn’t appreciate something telling me to stop reading. 😉 I really like the idea of the journal feature and all it can do. I own a nook and a kindle (which I bought because not all books were available on nook) but I don’t use all the features available on them. Like, I didn’t know kindle integrated with GR. Anyway, thanks for sharing Gerty…I’ll have to keep it in mind. 😀

Aww Gerty sounds amazing! I would LOVE to be able to read stuff like that! I use Calibre too, but there’s always a bit of a conversion mess. Of course, Gerty does not work with Android, and my Kindle and my phone are Android based soooo… maybe Gerty will come around with it soon! It sounds really great, I will be on the lookout!